The Wrong Side of You
by Chustang
Summary: AU 1x2 'All's fair in love and war' Duo and Heero are born on opposite sides of a mafia rivarly. Lured and captured onto the otherside, Heero gets wrapped up in Duo's manical games and a stab in the back from L-1. Yaoi, violence, language.


The Wrong Side of You  
by Chustang  
  
  
  
Prologue  
  
  
  
  
A cold course of action faced him. Die or kill. Kill or die. Kill that agent, or he would retaliate and kill him. Fingering the trigger on his faithful colt, the only gun, a practice gun, he'd had with him at the time he had been pulled into this encounter, the child called up his database of battle techniques and don't do's. If he was going to have to kill he wanted to use something he had been learning. Little time to do that, though, he bitterly commented to himself. No sense lighting candles when the house was about to burn down, he thought. He decided, while still pending who's death would be better appreciated, to keep moving at least. That would keep his target guessing and stationary if he did decide to carry out the mission. He snaked around easily, putting one leg to the side at a time. The injured lump of nine-year-old kid lay where his attacker had flying kicked him.  
  
At the moment Heero had encountered him in the dark alley, it was those eyes that been the first thing to intimidate him in his life besides the scolding of his harsh teachers, Dr. J and his blood lusting assistants. They were more mature than even his Prussian ones, in measure of all the pain contained there. Heero had seen more loss in those violet tinted eyes than scars on his back. But training had kicked in and erased sympathy when he had seen that familiar tattoo under his chin of a peace sign filled in blood red; Dr. J's rival crime syndicate's autograph: The Deuces. Heero knew better than to get cocky. If that kid got up again, he'd be madder than hell and probably use that portable laser jack rifle he saw poking out of his miniature trench coat.  
  
Heero licked some blood on his lip. The Deuce had managed to get a fingernail across his face before he went down. Allowing himself a moment to pinch the blood to a stop, Heero kept the barrel of his colt leveled precisely. One wrong move and that kid would be ground beef. He would like to take him in for interrogation, though. That would get him merits and therefore better training, better rank, and best of all, better weapons to defend himself. After all, the war wasn't only n the crime level; it was surviving alone every night.   
  
Heero's daydream of a jack rifle or gundanium knife was interrupted by a splitting bout of coughing from the Deuce. The eight-year-old got into a stance and aimed his gun, slowing to a halt directly in back of him. He was out of the way if he decided to pull the trigger of his jackrifle while he lay there through his trench coat and could easily get a choke hold when it stood up. But he had no need for that. He heard internal bleeding in that coughing, and the crimson proof ran on the blacktop. The child shifted weakly and most vocally. A grunt or yelp of peaking pain accompanied him until he managed to move his head from his fetal position to the side so one violet eye found Heero through a pile of brown bangs. A braid came from nowhere and lay limply beside the Deuce's face.  
  
"Alive, I see," Heero said. He only meant to intimidate the kid. "Remember, I could always fix that, so don't try anything, Deuce-shit."  
  
"Yeah," the Deuce said raspily. "I didn't plan… on it."   
  
That voice seemed way too deep for a kid barely past kindergarten. Heero was suspicious and moved the sights from the chest to the exposed neck. A slow death of bleeding would give him time to get the agent to his headquarters and would make him completely powerless. Then the barbaric doctors of his syndicate could patch him up with only a scar left. If they chose to.  
  
"Am I going to die?"  
  
"What?" Heero was strained by this question. Who hired this dipshit of a kid? Of course he was going to die, he'd just been captured!   
  
He closed one blue eye and focused his sights, which subconsciously went to those unnerving colored eyes. They were dull and lifeless already, why shouldn't his vital signs follow them? "Well, what do you think Deuce?"  
  
A smile pierced all that grimness. A smile missing teeth.   
  
"I think," he said, smart-assed, "you're going to take me home and bake me cookies and then let me fall asleep by the furnace."  
  
Heero was somewhat amused by this, but then again, amusement came rare and in niggardly packages. To any person listening to this conversation would be struck by the underlying tones of depression that Heero was struck by. This kid was in serious psychological shit… It was funny.  
  
"Yes, in a way."  
  
The ghostly purple lit up. "Really?" he rasped out, lifting his head laboriously from his coughed-up pool of blood. The Deuce's odd plait of hair was swinging in that crimson.  
  
"If you replace cookies with cyanide and sleep with die, yes," Heero replied, dispatching a shell to the shoulder to shut him up.   
  
His mindset was once again set on bloodletting and completion of the mission and the harsh bastard tone in his voice reflected that conviction. The alleyway, with its stereotypical billows of steam and dingy attitude, echoed with the ricocheting bullet as it easily ripped a bloody hole through the kid and continued on its way. Heero smirked as the body collapsed silently again, and predicted the path of the glancing bullet. The eight-year-old Jisatsu agent took a metal plate from his makeshift bulletproof vest and didn't jolt an inch as he caught it in the metal. Heero popped it out like a freshly made plastic creep crawly and stored it back in his colt.  
  
Easy.  
  
"You know… I like cyanide," the Deuce squeaked with hints of pain at the back of his cracking bass voice. Who did this kid think he was scaring? It wasn't Heero Yuy, that was for sure. Heero rolled his eyes, flipping back his coat flap and exchanging his colt for his steel cord, which he wrapped around both hands.   
  
"You're the usual Deuce whitehead, you know that? Smart-assed, ham-fisted, and you pop if you get squeezed by one measly bullet," he grumbled as he approached the body, eyes always considering the lethal shape of the jackrifle under that thin cloth.   
  
Heero pounced lithely, pressing one boot to the back of the Deuce, pinching his hands beneath it, and hooking his head back like a lethargic heifer with the cord too dull to slice any kind of human flesh or bone. The Deuce numbly accepted this jolting and closed his indigo eyes. The bold apple in his neck bobbed up and down, vibrating through the metal, as Heero was viciously ripping the trench coat, with no regard for the owner's price for it, and snapping the covert gun from its belt.  
  
"That's the first time I've been compared to a zit," he said listlessly.   
  
Heero coldly knocked him upside his head. "I've got more colorful language for you, Deuce. Now, if you want to live, you'll come with me for interrogation --"  
  
"Do you think I want to live?"  
  
Heero looked at him. Goddamn this deranged hippie American… he looked so lost. More so than even himself.  
  
"No."  
  
Heero kept on with his work, making quick use of his demolition skills on disengaging the owner lock on the jackrifle. . He hooked the gun into a spare holster and collected the jagged ends of the cord into one hand so he kept the head up. Ignoring the coppery scent of blood snaking through his senses and the feel of it as it pumped steadily from the bullet hole, Heero flipped the boy over like raw hamburger and stood there taking in the Deuce's new face for his computer database of a mind, pinning him down mercilessly with a boot.  
  
American. Definitely, with an Italian influenced skin-tint and large, expressive doll eyes. A carved pug nose. Babyish, ruby-pink lips. A solid neck. A hard-set jaw. Heero snorted coldly at the blood he'd inflicted that was the result of each tortured cough.   
  
Hell, this was minor damage compared to the stuff Heero Yuy had been through and a pile of scars could prove it to any extent you wanted. It was a chipped tooth squared off against an iceberg off a melting glacier. No contest in the pits of hell.   
  
It didn't surprise him that this kid was American. The Deuces hailed from L-2, the space colony with a mostly American or Spanish population. The syndicate he was currently training under, Jisatsu, was from L-1, and of course, Japanese. The sleazy members of these crime-hungry gangs were calling this the underground World War II. All they needed now was a bomb to drop on New Nagasaki.  
  
Heero leaned in and harshly reared back his head, indifferent to the cracking of neck bones that ensued along with an agonized groan of pain and a violently coughing fit which Heero didn't allow. He simply allowed the boy to shake and hack all he liked while his head was restricted in his fist. Prussian eyes scrutinized the identification code under the tattoo. The Deuce finally was subdued by his agony and went lolling limp with eyes plunged into the back of his head, like spaghetti in his hand. "932071," Heero confirmed to himself. The agent unceremoniously let the head smack against the tar frequented by puddles of rainbow oil discharge. The Deuce's face still found no peace, screwed up in pain. Heero slipped the cord into his pocket secretly and tucked his coat pocket tightly in, where his confidential plans were hidden. A quick scan of the grungy, drug-scented made his hair stand on end like trees in a hurricane.  
  
He picked up the severed weapon and securely snapped off the physical lock, after effectively discharging the handler lock that had conformed to the American's fingerprints. He worked with a dispassionate look, but inside, his childish heart was screaming with joy, being able to play with the mechanics of a gun. Heero coldly took aim, feeling the lethal power addictive in his hands, and suddenly was interrupted.  
  
"Jesus, where could that little fuck be?"  
  
"Always was the little smart-ass, if you ask me," a different voice intoned. "Maxy! Yo, Maxy! God… who let him out for the night anyway? Who's idea was that?"  
  
"Don't look at me, bitch."  
  
"Oh I don't want to, ugly as you's is."  
  
"Ugly or not, that street fuck is our salvation, ya hear? Lose him and those Japs will get the upper hand. Then we'll be screwed to hell."  
  
Well, Maxy sure won't. We can always cancel that whore for his thirteenth birthday, right? Maybe that's motivation for his soggy cereal ass."  
  
"Ah, Maxy don't know what a whore is. He couldn't even spell it."  
  
"That's because I was going to give him a lesson but fuck! – I couldn't, now could I?"  
  
"Shut up. I think I smell something."  
  
"Lou, this is a bitchin' alley. It don't smell like no bed of roses, you know, or no perfume. By the way… what is that shit you got on?"  
  
"God, shut up!"  
  
By now, the animal-instinct Heero was already depowering the gun from its burst of energy heat that had scalded his hands from the brief time he'd been on. If they happened not to notice them, then Heero could finish the mission. But if it was the glowing from the laser they noticed, he would never forgive himself for being so stupid. Flashing dangerous looks up both paths of the alley, he skillfully tucked the Deuce's hair into his torn trench coat as to hide his discernable feature so that his comrades might not come investigating. That was the best-light situation. But, biting his lip, he knew shit went wrong. He cussed as the clothing of the Deuce shifted and the raucous voices grew perilously close, eyes as wide as a cornered fox. The Deuce moaned in his sleep, and Heero wanted to smack him for giving away his position. Unfortunately, he was unconscious. Heero, cloaked into the black background by his black coat, paused indecisively once he spotted the gold chain against the back of the Deuce's neck.   
  
Something like that would see him a few good thousand dollars on the L-1 market, where gold was rarely imported. Heero snatched at it the last minute, as his newly acquired gun was stashed and the L-2 citizen made a guttural noise. Two shadows loomed only thirty feet away, in the mouth of the alley. Heero bolted. He grunted, nearly losing his grip on the wet, cobblestone alley, and used a nearby dumpster as a barricade, as an overly eager onslaught of bullets tailed him.  
  
"Aw shit, I knew I smelled Jap! Come on, Lou, what are you doing? We gotta get that kid!"  
  
"What the fuck are you doing?! This is Maxy!"  
  
"No way he got smacked up by that little thing! You saw that little Jisatsu running; he wasn't even Maxy's age."  
  
"I know… but God, look what he did to his ribs."  
  
"Gnarly. Is that fucking bone stickin' out like that?"  
  
"That's fucking bone."  
  
"Come on Jer, we gotta get that bastard."  
  
"Leave Maxy here and you're boiled in oil, Jer. Shit… he got a hole in his shoulder the size of his fucking ego."  
  
"… Jesus, the things I do for this street fuck."  
  
"Grab his feet, I'll get his head and stuff. Careful, dickhead! Kill this 'street fuck' and we will have our heads on Jap sticks!"  
  
"I am careful!"  
  
"Well, not enough!"  
  
"…Jeremy… Lou?"  
  
"Welcome back, dipshit."  
  
"Don't call me that… I've heard it enough…"  
  
"What did that Jisatsu do to you? Get his name or anything?"  
  
"No, no…"  
  
"Anything at all?"  
  
"Jeeze, you worthless–"   
  
"Lou, shut the anus on you face, okay? Now, Maxy… did you get anything? Whaddid he look like? And I smack you to hell if you say like a Japanese pug again; do you know how long it took us to find the other one?"  
  
"He was…just like me..."  
  
The Deuce now lay in a pained daze, hammocked between his two grungy, typical Italian gangster-flavored street rats like himself, only a decade or so older. The nine-year-old assassin lolled his head back against Jermaine, or Jer for short, for support. His body ached like a sliced piece of bread. The rest of the cuss-spiced conversation between Jer and Lou was lost on him, for he numbly watched the figure of the Jisatsu slip away in to the alley, water occasionally flying from his feet and catching light. He could have sworn it stopped once or twice.  
  
Maxy fell into light sleep until he was dumped, a lot gentler than usual but still dumped all the same, on to a hospital cot safely inside the L-2 abandoned warehouse, a.k.a. the Deuce Headquarters. He allowed himself to be swarmed by the smutty American nurses the second Lou and Jer backed off, who's clothes had been tailored by the horny older Deuces past puberty, allowed them to croon over him, and nearly rape him in their hurry to seal up his obvious wounds. A brilliant light stared down at him like a sun and in the background he could hear the drunken swoon of his comrades and the disapproving grunt of Dr. G.  
  
The skin around his purplish-blue eyes tightened as he tried to talk. All that came out was a gargled mix of blood and a shriek of pain. One nurse put her finger to his lips and sat beside his head, cleaning up the blood with little success. It still left traces on his skin. She bit her lip, he thought, but it was getting harder to discern things with the light seemingly getting brighter. "Shush, it's okay," she crooned.  
  
"I really don't think you should be telling the boy such lies," came Dr. G's voice as he strolled into the room. Maxy vaguely caught the sound of a door clicking shut. The flurry of hands tending to each wound, long-fingernailed and manicured, recoiled from helping him suddenly as another, more deadly click came to ear. Craning his head painfully, he was met by the barrel of his own gun in Dr. G's hand. All the nurses, except for the one that kept stroking his hair, had retreated at the professor's look and left his bloody torso naked and red in the light. "It is not okay."  
  
The Deuce tried to gulp; it would make him feel better about what was coming. His throat was too dry.  
  
"You better have a damned good reason for this, 93207," Dr. G said dangerously, finding the safety with one finger and clicking it off. "I didn't train you for your entire life to end up a soft-stomached nothing. Internal bleeding? That's nothing, right? You remember the exercise we have for internal bleeding, don't' you?"  
  
He grimly nodded as much as he could without inducing pain.  
  
The mushroom shaped man, body slumped with age but not his mind or cruelty, stepped slightly into the light, but only his dagger nose, bubbly lips, and scar were visible under his hair. "So. You know what that means, don't you?"  
  
He shook his head, sweat-slicked bangs clouding his already blurry vision. He didn't need to see that expression to feel it.  
  
"No?"   
  
Dr. G chuckled.  
  
The barrel finally left the spot between his brows and slid back into Dr. G gray slacks. As much as his heaving, violently bleeding chest would allow, he sighed a bit of relief.  
  
"Now, I won't be a complete bastard to you. You have been one our best students ever, not to mention a constant, if prohibited, uplifting humor to the rest of our syndicate, and I suppose I'll never be able to stop you from doing that. I admit you show a genius for public infiltration and mechanics but you must understand that all of that is a pathetic waste if you die because of such minor injuries. This is nothing, boy."  
  
The Deuce tore his eyes away from his professor. It was reversed by a raw slap from the decrepit man that left him about to fall off the metal table. Screwing up his face and breathing ragged, the nine-year-old body just curled on its side, about to fall to the floor that seemed could kill him. He watched the blood spill out on to the cement until Dr. G circled around the table. Maxy stared at his torso as long as he dared before craning his head.  
  
"Never, never look away from me, you piece of shit," he glowered.  
  
"Yes sir," he managed to reply submissively. God, how much his neck hurt… it was funny, that his neck ached so much he couldn't stand it while he rarely cared about the rib through his skin and the bullet hole in his shoulder. But he wasn't laughing.  
  
"Good." A long, wrinkling hand pushed him over back onto his back. "Now, I know you do not want to repeat the internal bleeding training, correct?"  
  
The Deuce stared up at the ceiling. His lips moved once, nothing came, and he tried again.   
  
"Yes sir." It was barely audible.  
  
"Good. But you still aren't looking at me." Maxy screamed as the raw slap was replaced with a sharp yank to his braid that sent more than a few strands ripping.   
  
Tears came finally from the child as his cruel professor fingered it dangerously. A predator look came to those squinted eyes and an innocent sob came from Maxy, afraid for the only memory of his mother. Buried somewhere in training, lonely nights, pain, and drunken days granted by his comrades, he could remember his mother cradling him and running her fingers through his hair. She always smelled like strawberries. It was his sole speck of reassurance that he always had.  
  
Luckily, Dr. G lost interest in torturing his victim/student.  
  
"Now," he spat coldly. "You see that rib? I want you to set it back in place. Until you do that, I will not allow any nurse to touch you, for physical or emotion support or healing." He eyed up the nurse that remained stubbornly by the bloodstained cot and she obediently bowed her head and swiftly exited. Maxy watched her go with a bit of wretchedness. A raw slap brought him back to Dr. G's face, contorted by anger and dissatisfaction. "Set it, or we will find a replacement for you."  
  
The mushroom shaped man recoiled into the shadow, still retaining the gun at the ready.  
  
For over an hour, the boy struggled against his mounting nausea, dizziness, and rapid loss of blood. His body arched from pain the second any one of his muscles moved and bouts of coughing were as frequent as stripes on a zebra. Bloodied hands gingerly wrapped around the exposed bone, and with a scream, he put it back into the jagged flesh and blacked out. Dr. G waved in the nurses, watched them go to quick work. One again seated herself by his head, this time unbraiding his hair and gently grooming it as the rest sewed up his bullet hole and ripped chest. Then they disappeared, taking him.  
  
Dr. G spat and smashed the gun under his foot quite easily. This boy would never break…   
  



End file.
